His hand restrained her, silenced her. "Hush!" he said. "You are my wife. I love you, and I want you."
Tears came to her then with a rush, blinding, burning, overwhelming, and yet their very agony was relief to her. She made no further effort to loosen his hold. She even feebly clung to him as one needing support.
"Ah, but I must tell you—I must tell you," she whispered at last.
"If—if you mean to forgive me, you must know—everything."
"Tell me, if it helps you," he answered, and he spoke with the splendid patience that twenty weary months had wrought in him. "Only believe—before you begin—that I have forgiven you. For—before God—it is the truth."
And so presently, lying in his arms, her face hidden low on his breast, she told him all, suppressing nothing, extenuating nothing, simply pouring out the whole bitter story, sometimes halting, sometimes incoherent, but never wavering in her purpose, till, like an evil growth that yet clung about her palpitating heart, her sin lay bare before him—the sin of a woman who had almost forgotten that Love is a holy thing.
He heard her to the end with scarcely a word, and when she had finished he made one comment only.
"And so you gave him up."
She shivered with the pain of that memory. "Yes, I gave him up—I gave him up. Nick had made me see the hopelessness of it all—the wickedness. And he—he let me go. He saw it too—at least he understood. And on that very night—oh, Will, that awful night—he went to his death."
His arms grew closer about her. "My poor girl!" he said.
"Ah, but you shouldn't!" she sobbed. "You shouldn't! You ought to hate me—to despise me."